winter in the intertidal

I was out in the sub-freezing weather in Rhode Island this weekend to set up succession plots and settlement plates to measure barnacle recruitment, which has already begun! (See a slideshow of last year's recruits here.) There's nothing like seawater freezing on your double-gloved hands to make you feel alive!

I expected the rocky intertidal fauna that had the option to ride out the extreme cold buried in the mud, but I was surprised to see many of the mobile critters out and about during the extreme low tides (-0.5 m or -1.6 ft, nearly 0.5 m lower than the predicted low tide, probably due to wind). Seastars were remarkably abundant, and I also saw a lady crab, Ovalipes ocellatus, a swimming crab that I rarely find in the intertidal (the Kunkel lab at UMass Amherst has a good lady crab photo here).

SEASTAR TRAPPED IN ICE IN THE HIGH INTERTIDAL


BARNACLES ENCASED IN ICE